mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

SB Selection Show (Edit: We do not host Regional)

EDIT: We travel to Arizona State as the #2 Seed, and #9 overall. So even if we win the Regional we will have to travel to the winner of the Talahassee Regional of FSU, Fordhan, South FLorida and South Carolina.

In the Tempe Regional; Arizona State gets the #1 seed, SDSU gets the #3 and Dartmouth gets the #4. So we play SDSU on Friday 3:30pm on ESPNU while ASU plays Dartmouth at 6pm.

Minny gets the #16 overall and hosts. Wiskey, Nebraska and Northwestern gets in as well.

The NCAA Softball Selection Show will be held tonight at 10pm on ESPNU. Coach Hutch and Team 37 look to hold on to a Top-16 ranking in order to host a Regional. This will be a refreshing time for me as I recover from jet-lag after my Asian Tour 2014 (Korea, China, Hong Kong and Japan)

For those who do not understand selection process, their are 64 teams selected. Each conference champion gets an automatic bid. Then At-large bid are then given out.

The Top-16 teams are ranking 1-16 and each are eligible to host a Regional Tourney at their home site. There have been a few occasions where the host team travels. The Committee will force a top seeded team to travel because the concentration of top teams are in the Southwest and West Coast. So look for one or two teams from this region to be a top 16 team but forced to travel but be the host of their Regional.

The Top 16 team are placed into a bracket. Then the rest of the 3 teams are filled in based on overall ranking. Each Regional bracket is seeded 1 through 4. This is a double elimination, 4-Team bracket where 1 plays 4 and 2 plays 3 in the opening set of games; usually starting on Friday night

The winner of each bracket will move on to the Super Regionals where the winner of bracket 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15 etc. The winner of the Top 8 brackets host the Super Regional round. The winner of each Super Regional moves on to the World Series in Norman, Oklahoma.

My prediction is that we will be ranked in the 14 or 15 slot. We had some very bad loses this year and at the moment, we are not worthy of a Top-8 Ranking. There will be some on the Committee who will not vote for us in the Top 16 either. The loss to Minny in the championship game will not help. My guess is that the Big Ten will get three or four teams in.

First, the habit of making top 16 seeds travel seems to have disappeared. In both 2012 and 2013, all 16 of the top 16 seeds got to play at home in the regional round. I expect that to continue.

My pessimistic prediction...Michigan travels to Lexington, Kentucky, to play in a regional with #14 national seed Kentucky: #1 Kentucky v #4 Ohio University; #2 Michigan v #3 Virginia Tech, with the winner traveling to Los Angeles to play #3 national seed UCLA in the super-regional.

Four of these 8 teams will host regionals; 4 will not. I think Washington and Kentucky are locks, and Auburn and Minnesota are ahead of Michigan as well. The question is how heavily the committee will weight the RPI ranking and how heavily the committee will weight the "record vs top 50". In my experience, these are the biggest factors that the committee looks at.

Every few years, it seems like the committee starts emphasizing different factors. Hopefully they start taking geography into account again (they abruptly stopped in 2012). Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Missouri are all in the top 10, and certainly deserve to host regionals. But if they give regionals to Tennessee, Auburn and Kentucky as well, giving the SEC 7 regionals of the 16, that would be going too far in my opinion.

The Big Ten does have a shot at 5 teams in the tournament. Minnesota, Michigan and Nebraska are locks, and Wisconsin and Northwestern are on the bubble. I think Wisconsin is in and Northwestern is out, but it's borderline for both of them.

I don't generally root for anybody else in the conference in any sport, but I wouldn't mind seeing some success by a few Big Ten teams in addition to Michigan.

Sara has just had a really off year, it seems. As long as Haylie and Betsa are the primary two pitchers, I think this team gets back to OKC.

And is there really any doubt that Romero doesn't win the college softball Heisman--the USA Softball Collegiate Player of the Year? She's on pace to smash the batting average record at Michigan in a season.

To get through ASU and FSU (chalk super regional opponent) will be much tougher than you think.

Our pitching is not consistent and the bottom of our lineup does not produce. We lost some games down the stretch a world series team does not lose (Illinois). If we had won the big ten tournament we would host the 16 regional not minnesota. Dallas escobedo is a great pitcher for asu.

The Minny fans are saying just the opposite. If we win the B1G we are #16 and host. So it goes both ways. Although I do agree with you on the point. Tournaments do not determine the best team, only the hottest team.

You know damn well had the roles been reversed in Basketball, the sparty fans would be saying the same exact thing we were. Because it makes sense.

We all saw last year how well the B1G Tournament winner did compared to the B1G Champion in the NCAA SB Tournament.

Sadly, conference tournaments are here to stay. One thing that infuriates me is that the B1G Tournament host is decided by......get this......ALPHABETICAL ORDER. Nebraska hosted it last year, NW this year, ohio next year etc.

So, by the time Michigan gets it, it will be 2024 and I'll be going on 29. Wonderful.

What happened to rewarding the best team in the conference by letting them host the B1G Tournament? Would be a small consolation for having to play in it.

Utah valley won a the double elimination WAC tournament. Double elimination is much better than the single elimination big ten tournament so it's not that upsetting to have Utah valley in the tournament. The more wolverines the better.

The regular season was winner was 27-21 Grand Canyon. The same grand canyon you see advertising a private school education at a public school price on tv. No good team was going to come out of that conference.

perform down the stretch. We had some terrible losses that were unacceptable. You have to win the games that you SHOULD win. There is no magic here. I am not surprised by the seeding at all. My only beef is the Tournament Champion gets the nod over the regular season champion.

We lost to unranked Houston, Illinois and Purdue. The loss to Illinois was a mercy-rule loss to boot. How can we be taken seriously by getting mercied by the last place team?

Interesting to note that the other 3 teams in the regional have relatively weak offenses compared to their overall ratings. Expect a low-scoring regional, which might actually work to Michigan's advantage. Also, you would think SDSU would have played a difficult schedule, but they are only 1-5 against the top 50 (their best win was over #45 Long Beach State).